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Things I learned over the weekend - Monday, 20 September 2010

By buzz_clik September 19, 2010 19 Comments

Yup, it happened again! Despite my best attempts, I emerged from my rostered two days off with more stuff in my brain. Check it.

Forgetting to do the Save & Quit thing can be a bitch.

This is the bit I'm going to have to do all over again. Now I've had a restful weekend, I don't feel so bad about it. At the time, though? Grrrrr.

I'd been playing Halo: Reach for a bit before having guests over for dinner and a movie on Friday night. They eventually rocked up, and when they did I ejected the disc to put some music on. Unfortunately, I forgot to hit Save & Quit before popping the game out. I figure it must surely be okay because I'd just finished a level – bastard tough even on Heroic – and even garnered an Achievement for doing so.

Hey, guess what happened when I went to play it after our visitors had left? You got it. I was several checkpoints back, which quickly sapped my will to stay up and plough through that whole stretch again. I want it known that normally I am a big stickler for the Save & Quit routine, and will even normally faff about in other parts of the game's menus before finally switching off. I'm just miffed that this one time I didn't, Reach's shit save/checkpoint system really seemed to enjoy sticking it to me as punishment.

Podcasts make everything okay.

Outside of the movie night on Friday, most of my weekend was taken up with mowing lawns for my girlfriend's parents. They've semi-recently purchased a beach house, the (large) lawn area was mad overgrown and they had no means to cut it. Cue fanfare and flapping cape as I stand with one foot on my trusty Flymo. I don't really mind doing chores of this nature (especially if it means we can use the beach house) but this was a doozy. I was facing 5 or so hours of pushing my hovering contraption around very uneven terrain filled with lush, unchecked grass.

Luckily, I had an iPod handy that was stocked with last week's round of podcasts. The Bombcast helped me through three of my hardworking hours, and for that I thank all involved in its production.

There will only be one king of the futuristic battle racer in my lifetime.

Ugh. Wipeout Fusion's mangled team logo redesigns were not hot.

This might sound like a myopic statement, but for my money I can't see anything coming close to dethroning the Wipeout series (no, not that one). As you may or may not know, I'm a big fan of the Wipeout games, even recently going through a period of designing new team logos for the fun of it. I even really enjoyed the oft-maligned Fusion, which was possibly the weakest in graphical styling (although it had one of the strongest soundtracks). I find the games such an enveloping pitch-perfect blend of graphic design, great tunes, fast action and giddy violence that anything else will seem like a pallid clone at best. My only lament is that I don't own a PSP with which to play Pure and Pulse.

The reason I'm telling you all of this is because I paid five whole Australian bucks for Fatal Inertia. I've only played a few hours of it, and it seems to be emphatically innocuous. It's certainly not bad, and there are things I quite like about it, but it's just so bland and generic in a lot of its presentation and ideas that I'm not really sucked into the world that KOEI have constructed. I'm not willing to write it off completely after so little time with it, and I'll probably finish it, but I get the feeling I've already seen most of the thrills and spills that the game has to offer.

Having the theme to 'Allo 'Allo stuck in your head sucks.

I woke up on Sunday morning with the opening tune to 'Allo 'Allo mysteriously lodged in my brain. I've no idea why because I'm no big fan of the series, only infrequently watching it as a child. As I awoke and pottered around, I had the annoying accordion ditty floating around my head for half an hour or more. Needless to say, it was a little infuriating. Stupid brain.

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